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Tuesday, 13 June 2017

A tweet of diminishing returns

I just returned from Iceland, a glorious
trip in which I suffered severe sleep deprivation in the pursuit of birds. I
ended up pressing my shutter 4,114 times over the course of the weekend which
is pretty obscene. Last night when I got home I downloaded all of these, and
before I passed out I quickly processed a few of them that I remembered taking.
I tweeted them out, including one as I thought it was actually quite good and
had a little bit of a “wow” factor to it. Showing off in other words. I don’t
do it often, or at least not any more as I barely get to use my camera. Then I
had the most amazing sleep I can’t remember.

Turns out that I was right, it does have
that little something extra about it, and as far as I am aware it has gathered
more attention than any other photo I have put up. I say as far as I am aware
because I have only just now discovered a function of Twitter that shows you
how many times any banal tweet you sling out has been seen by other people. Stats
in other words – a little bar called “view tweet activity” on my mobile phone, or a little graph symbol online. Has anyone ever
used this? I had no idea that this was even possible and I am staggered that
the IT systems that sit behind Twitter can even do this at all. Now I don’t
know that I can call this viral exactly, but as I write this the photo has been
seen by nearly 16,000 people in the last 24 hours. I say seen, but this is where the stats become
interesting, and where the true vacuity of Twitter becomes apparent. He actual
stat is called “Impressions” and apparently means how many times a tweet has
been viewed on Twitter – you can actually see this number ticking up as you
look at it, so you know that somebody somewhere just wiggled their finger and….scrolled
right past it!The reason I say that is that there is another stat
called “Total Engagements”, which I think means how many times somebody didn’t
scroll right past but actually paused and clicked on it. That number is 1,598,
so about 10%. Nine out of ten cats….. Then we have something called “Media engagements”, which is how many times
somebody actually clicked on the photo, i.e. to make it bigger. This is where it
gets interesting. 953.So 60% of the
people that lingered also wanted to see more. Of those, 319, so about a third,
felt they had the time to hit the little “like” button. This takes all of about
a nano-second, I know this as I’ve done it myself many times with little to no thought whatsoever. Until now I had no idea what it
actually meant, but now of course I realise it is directly connected to inner
glow and happiness. 55 people went the extra step of retweeting it, the Twitter equivalent of forwarding an email, so about a sixth of those who had “liked” it if of course it is a subset which it may not
be. I don’t know and I am not interested enough to find out. And anyway, it
would not fit with my journey of diminishing returns that is the whole point of
this post. Continuing with which, 37 people decided they were interested in who took the photo and would look at my
profile, the one which says I am a dedicated patch birder hem hem. I have
received no proposals of marriage and my acolyte count has risen by
approximately four, and here we are
getting to the nub of it I think. There have been six replies. Six. A mere six people could be bothered to actually type anything, and one of those was a German guy who I think missed what was supposed to be an expression of favourable fortune and extreme jamminess when I said "Not quite sure how this happened, but I'll take it" and told me that the reason was the bird's feathers had lost their hydrophobicness. I thank them for it of
course, especially Kurt, but as a demonstration of the here today gone tomorrow uselessness of
social media I think this is an excellent case study. 0.0375% of people who saw
the photo actually said anything about it. To put that another way, for every
one person that did type something, 2,665 did not!! It is therefore fortunate that I
do not rely on bird photography (or Twitter!) for a living, as the amount of
money I have earned from this photo rounds to exactly £0.00. In fact it cost me
money to even take it, not only because my shutter is now one frame closer to stopping
working, but also because surviving on anything other than bread and water in
Iceland requires that one practically be a billionaire.